


the hardest part is letting go of your dreams

by bossy



Category: Fight Club (1999), Fight Club - All Media Types, Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Genre: M/M, Rough Sex, Written in 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 06:54:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18405425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bossy/pseuds/bossy
Summary: This whole sex thing started because I couldn’t sleep. If I hadn’t been awake, Tyler wouldn’t have crept into my room and sat down on the edge of my mattress, silent for a moment as he leaned back and took a drag on his cigarette, filling the room with the deep pungent scent of nicotine.





	the hardest part is letting go of your dreams

It’s late, when Tyler comes into my room. It’s nearing sepia-toned, still-as-oblivion dawn. Birds and bugs don’t live within two blocks of the thick, ammonia-saturated air by Tyler’s house, and the dark shadow of the warehouse across the street distorts the light, so I don’t know the exact time. I stopped wearing my watch after I quit my job. Does it really matter what time it is here, when it’s different everywhere else? 

Right now, the sun is setting in Anchorage. It’s the middle of the afternoon in Sri Lanka. It’s a little after midnight in San Diego. When your plane touches down at the airport, the pilot tells you, set your watches back an hour. Set it forward two hours. We are now in central standard time.

Does it matter what time it is now, when the time is always changing? When it’s impossible to hold onto one single moment, even if it’s the greatest moment of your life?

I stopped wearing my watch after I met Tyler.

“This isn’t the greatest moment of your life,” he corrects me. It’s dawn, and Tyler’s in my room. Ten minutes ago I was alone, and now he is kneeling over me on my mattress, his bathrobe and sweatpants pooling in a heap on the floor, right where the water always does after a storm. 

“Did you hear Marla telling me it was the greatest moment of her life,” Tyler continues, “after she asked if I’d just fucked her six times, or seven? No. No, it’s not. The greatest moment of your life is the first step you take to climb the steep hill of hitting bottom. The greatest moment of your life is the very second you know you can finally grasp freedom in your hands.”

“This isn’t about Marla. Marla thought she was dead,” I counter, frowning up at him. “Marla had an overdose of Xanax and a lump on her breast. I have a black eye and a chemical burn. I know I’m alive, Tyler.”

“And because you know you are alive, because you are secure in your world, what we’re about to do isn’t important,” Tyler says, running a finger down my jawbone. “You have to realize that in the big picture, sex means nothing.”

What you have to realize is, this isn’t a normal conversation between me and Tyler. Normally, we’d be planning for next week’s fight club. Normally, Tyler would be telling me something like how you can make thermite from rusty nails and the innards of an etch-a-sketch, how if you mix potassium permanganate and powdered sugar you’ll get explosives powerful enough to blast a hole in the side of an armored car.

This whole sex thing started because I couldn’t sleep. If I hadn’t been awake, Tyler wouldn’t have crept into my room and sat down on the edge of my mattress, silent for a moment as he leaned back and took a drag on his cigarette, filling the room with the deep pungent scent of nicotine. 

Tyler wouldn’t have muttered, “look at us, we’re meaningless. We are God’s dandruff. If we want to make a difference in this fucked up world, we have to do something bigger than voting in pointless elections that end up as just another sentence in the history books. Why does everyone think they’re doing something, just by choosing someone new to repress them? We’re living an illusion, and we’re all too drugged with propaganda to see it.”

“We’ve got to do something bigger than punching the lights out of someone whose grandkids won’t even remember him in 50 years,” I contributed, raising myself to a sitting position and watching Tyler lazily massage the back of his neck. “We’ve got to live on forever.”

Tyler nodded and said, “we’ll be the porn stars in magazines that never grew old because we had no faces, no hairstyles, just open, gaping pussies.”

I expected him to leave, after that. Tyler is transient like that. Every time you see him, you think it’s an illusion. He splices himself into your life the same way he puts pornography into kids’ movies.

This time, Tyler didn’t leave. Instead, looking right at me as I huddled back down into the mattress, Tyler continued, “yeah, if there’s one thing that never gets old, it’s sex. They were doing it back when the high point of life was hitting an arrow in the back of a woolly mammoth, and we’re still doing it now. All those gentlemen in cravats and spectacles, every night they were getting it on with their refined little wives. All those businessmen with receding hairlines and perfectly shined elevator shoes, after work they’re slamming some crackwhore into the alley wall.”

If I hadn’t been awake, he would never have looked for my affirmation as he said, “sex connects us all, and what does humanity do? Humanity tries to shun it. Humanity calls it evil.”

What does someone who signed his marriage contract to a condo on the 15th floor of Pearson Towers say to that?

Sleep clinging to his skin, shrugging off his bathrobe and stretching his arms, Tyler wouldn’t have leaned back on the mattress, mouth practically brushing against my ear as he told me, “a couple years ago, I slept with a man. Rammed up against the bathroom wall with some stranger’s dick in my ass, I realized, we’re fools to trust everything society tells us without even asking why. I realized, the only thing that matters, with sex, is stimulation.”

Maybe, if it had been morning, that wouldn’t have meant anything. It would have just been another of Tyler’s stories. Another little quirk. If it had been morning, maybe I could’ve retreated to my cave instead of imagining the tight heat of Tyler’s ass closing around my dick, the musculature of Tyler’s back pressing against my chest as I thrusted inside of him.

Tyler’s voice wouldn’t have continued, breathing hot against my ear, “it feels better than even sleeping with Marla fucking Singer, that kinky bitch, getting your prostate stimulated like that.”

“Look, I don’t–,” I stammered. “I’m not–”

“It doesn’t mean anything about you, if you want to try it. It doesn’t mean anything about you, if you want my huge cock deep inside your ass, gnashing right against your prostate with every thrust. Giving you the best orgasm you’ve ever had. Showing you that you are free.”

“What would Marla think about that?” I asked, suddenly having trouble making eye contact with Tyler.

“You still don’t get it,” Tyler said. “You don’t fight because you’ve got a personal vendetta against whoever said he’d fight you, and you sure as hell don’t fuck because you’ve got any feelings tying you down. I thought you were above this, man. You’ve got to reject society’s expectations for you.”

He sat up, and I could smell sweat on his skin, mixed with his primal scent of gasoline and smoke and iron. I watched his deltoids play as he lifted his arms over his head, nonchalantly, watched the way his abdominals became even more defined over the wet sand color of his skin. It’s like he was challenging me, with the bulge in his sweatpants.

He met my eyes, fiercly, and I knew there was no turning back, that I’d crossed some invisible line. That if I didn’t take this chance now, Tyler might never open this door for me again.

“Let’s do this, Tyler,” I said, and now here he is.

This is the first time I’ve ever been glad about having insomnia.

“Sex is arbitrary,” Tyler continues, staring down into my eyes, “the same way that individual fights are meaningless. If you know this, you are a step closer to freedom.”

Sex is splicing pornography into The Little Mermaid, for one sixtieth of a second. You’ve got no time to prepare for it. When it’s over, you don’t even really know what’s happened, unless of course you’re Tyler, sitting in the projection room, watching that flash of a hard cock on the screen and knowing you’re the only one who will ever see it. Some things, you can only see them if you know they’re there.

I tell him I understand.

He leans down and kisses me, slowly. I taste the iron tang of his blood in my mouth, and for no reason at all, I think of the kiss between Jesus and Judas. I think of drinking poison.

Tyler shifts more of his weight down onto me so I can feel his hard cock pressing against my thigh. I remember the pour of lye against my hand. I remember my fist meeting his jaw. I feel the dizzying buzz of insomnia on my skin, the room a mesh of dull-colored shadows like watercolor paint in front of me, and I have to swallow hard, have to make myself feel the raw burn of my sore throat, to remind myself that I’m awake. That this is real.

“This is going to hurt,” Tyler says, with his cough-syrup, oxygen-mask voice.

The kind of voice like he’s got a chloroformed napkin hiding under the mattress. Like he’s pumped the room with the chloropicrin we keep around to use as rat poison through the air ducts. Loss of consciousness in 3, 2, 1.

“Fine,” I say, swallowing hard.

Tyler, deliver me.

I shift my hips up, let him slide my boxers down my bruised legs, still sore from last night’s fight club. I think to myself, this is what Marla felt that afternoon when I crept to Tyler’s room and peered through the confessional window of a barely opened door.

I am Jack’s soaring sense of self-worth.

“This is your goodbye present,” Tyler says, as he pushes my legs open; I bend my knees, letting him in closer. “This is to inspire you to hit bottom. This is your new cave; I am your new power animal.”

His wet fingers creep up to press against my inner thigh, and my muscles, they’re tensing again. I’m listening to my own heartbeat, racing in overtime, and my breath struggles to keep up with it, my mind struggles to keep up with his words. I nod, mindlessly. He is leaning too close, each of his breaths captured hot on my chest. Tyler’s fingers skirt down underneath my hardening cock, grazing against my asshole, and it’s taking everything out of me not to tense up, not to show him that it’s taking everything out of me not to retreat to my cave.

I let out a breath when those fingers press inside, firmly, my mind finally beginning to catch on to what he has just told me, repeating softly, drone-like, this is your goodbye present. With 400 kegs of nitroglycerin in my condo as a greeting, I should have expected Tyler to turn my world upside-down when he said goodbye.

Breathing heavy on my neck, voice a rough, husky whisper, he tells me I’ve wanted this. Since his fist collided with my chest in the parking lot. Since he traced the lines of my hand and glistened his lips. Since we created new fight clubs together, hid from Marla and her collagen-infested mother together. Tyler tells me about the way my gaze lingered on him when we first met, the way my heart raced harder than it ever had before when I raised my fist to strike him for the first time, the way my jaw clenched hard, muscles tense, when I woke up to find Marla in the kitchen. He tells me things he shouldn’t know.

Tyler starts to knead his wet, latex-glove covered fingers in me, and it’s not hurting as much as it should. My muscles aren’t tense any more. That’s no surprise; the first thing chloropicrin does is relax you. Chloropicrin, like the oxygen in the little white masks on planes, it makes you lightheaded after you inhale it. I wait for my eyes to start burning; that’s the next sign.

Tyler’s fingers are covered in something that doesn’t feel like lube. I pray to God it’s not nitroglycerin, not the methyl ethyl ketone peroxide from the basement that could blind me, could burn me ten times worse than the lye. That one would be hard to explain to the emergency room staff. Before I can ask what it is, before I can ask where he’s going that he has to say goodbye like this, he has withdrawn his fingers, leaving me naked and vulnerable on the mattress.

I hear Tyler slamming a drawer open in his bedroom, probably the drawer where he keeps all the condoms he filches off abortion clinics and teen health centers, and suddenly I’m tensing up. The first and last time I made the mistake of looking into that particular drawer, I flashed back to the the drawer of prizes my dentist always had, only instead of flimsy, plastic-wrapped toothbrushes and little travel tubes of toothpaste, it’s filled with different colored single-serving condom packets. Ribbed condoms, lubricated condoms, strawberry-kiwi flavored condoms, latex-free condoms, neon green glow-in-the-dark condoms, Tyler’s got them all. Tyler’s filing cabinet is a condom zoo. He collects condoms the way I used to collect baseball cards.

I look up at him, leaning slightly on my shoulders, to try to watch what he’s doing. Tyler, tearing open the package and stretching the condom over his dick, he’s as confident as ever. He’s using one of the normal lubricated ones. I guess he didn’t want to waste the glow-in-the-dark one on me.

“Ready?” Tyler asks, watching me.

“Yeah,” I say, mouth dry.

He moves closer, and all I can think is he was getting off with his fingers inside me. Leaning over me, spreading my legs open, his dick was getting harder and harder. Soon, the tip of his dick is resting against my ass. I meet his eyes and Tyler smiles, and he pushes his dick inside. For a brief, panic-filled second my body is rejecting him, my racing heartbeat is telling me to get him out now, but then he thrusts his dick forward, just right, and my own dick jerks fast, is straining up against his taut abdominal muscles. Tyler Durden is fucking me, and I feel enlightened.

“Fuck,” I breathe, voice shaky, this strained, chemical taste in my mouth, like I’ve just been running hard, and without meaning to, I’m reaching down for my own cock. “Fuck, Tyler.”

“This is the first and likely the last time you will ever feel this,” Tyler says, and he pushes my arm away and curls his own hand around my cock, just like that, with the same authoritative determination that he had poured the lye onto my skin. I watch his hand pumping my dick, and my eyes have to follow that hand up the lean, sculpted muscles of his arm just to believe what I’m seeing.

I’m getting a hand job from Tyler Durden.

“There’s something Marla can’t do for me,” Tyler says, slowing his pace for a moment. “Do you know what that is?”

He’s watching me, hand jerking excruciatingly slowly and his thumb circling the tip of my cock.

“No,” I hiss, trying hard not to buck my hips up into his hand, “and Jesus, Tyler, do I look like Marla?”

“I don’t know, man, you’ve got her tits,” Tyler says, laughing as he thrusts hard inside of me again, fisting his hand around my cock. “Tighter, though, fuck, man. But that’s not what I mean. This is your one chance to show me who you really are. Last night’s fight club didn’t really – ah, fuck – didn’t really do it for me.”

His eyes, they’re challenging me, and his skin, it doesn’t have nearly enough bruises.

This is my fist meeting the bridge of Tyler’s nose. This is Tyler’s teeth sinking into my lower lip, his calloused, slippery hands cradling my balls, the unabashed lift of my hips, the sound of flesh on flesh like a Saturday night fight, the shake of plaster hitting the floor.

Trailing kisses down my bruised chest, dick thrusting hard inside my ass, he answers me by shoving my head down to the mattress, hard enough to rip the bandage off my temple, by fucking me even more furiously until I’m gasping for breath, still pushing up against him, still letting him in deeper.

I’d give up everything for Tyler.

This is the slide of wound against wound, scar against scar. This is the blood collecting under my head on the mattress. This is your lips pressing against the hole in my cheek. This is your fingers pressed against the kiss on my hand, holding it to my chest to acquaint me with my mortality. This is my nails reopening the gash by your collarbone, your hips bruising against mine, my lips gasping against yours and still tasting the bitter adrenaline rush of your blood.

Tyler comes inside me, shuddering, fingers wound tighter against my dick, thrusting until they are sticky with my come and I am closing my eyes, resting my head in the sticky pool of blood. He pulls away, and I’m shivering, lightheaded. In French, they call orgasms le petit mort, the little death.

Only after disaster can you be resurrected.

“This is the beginning of your journey,” Tyler says. “This is your spiritual epiphany.”

Tyler says, “this is what will set you free.”

He kisses the deep red bruise on my temple.

I sleep.


End file.
